Today at Black Hat 2016, SparkCognition is launching DeepArmor, an AI-powered anti-malware platform that promises to protect networks from many new and never-before-seen cyber security threats. This signifies a major industry advancement, of baking advanced artificial intelligence techniques, including neural networks and Natural Language Processing, into anti-virus (AV). As many as 78% of security professionals no longer trust traditional antivirus because existing solutions cannot keep up with rapidly evolving malware. SparkCognition makes products that identify, analyze, learn, anticipate and adjust to impending and real time cyber security threats and the company is exhibiting this week at Black Hat in booth 372.

“Cyber crime is growing beyond our control. According to the Singapore Minister of Home Affairs, Law Shanmugam, an estimated $2 trillion will be lost through cybercrime by 2019,” said Lucas McLane, director of Security Solutions for SparkCognition. “This is a recipe for disaster, and the major reason why both state and federal governments are making cyber security the top priority.”

To combat this growing problem and technological deficiency, SparkCognition has released the industry’s first cognitive antivirus solution, DeepArmor. DeepArmor takes a unique approach to endpoint protection by leveraging neural networks, advanced heuristics, and data science techniques to find and remove malicious files. Instead of looking at static signatures, or even exploding files in a sandbox, DeepArmor looks at the DNA of every file to identify if any components are suspicious or malicious in nature.

“We are using cognitive algorithms to constantly learn new malware behaviors and recognize how polymorphic files may try to attack in the future. This keeps every endpoint safe from malware that leverages domain-generated algorithms, obfuscation, packing, minor code tweaks, and many other modern tools,” explained SparkCognition senior product manager, Keith Moore. “This is a necessary defense against potentially devastating Zero-Day threats, which often confound and evade existing tools.”

DeepArmor is powered by cutting edge technology that represents a quantum leap beyond techniques used for malware generation or propagation. Pulling from proprietary SparkCognition automated model-building algorithms, DeepArmor, starts by looking at every un-scanned file on a user’s desktop or laptop. It breaks each file into thousands of different pieces for initial review. It then elevates initially identified features using an advanced feature derivation algorithm to develop a comprehensive, multi-dimensional view of behaviors, workflows and techniques. All of these individually analyzed components are then run through continuously evolving ensembles of neural networks to find patterns that may be malicious in nature. Because these neural networks are trained on a bevy of threat types, from Worms to Ransomware, many malevolent patterns present are unearthed and called out immediately, even if the file that contains them doesn’t have a known-bad signature.

“We have tailored DeepArmor to operate seamlessly behind the scenes on each endpoint, and to only identify real threats without calling out false positives,” added Moore. “This gives any user the freedom to do what they would like without the fear that their computer may become infected.”

About SparkCognition
SparkCognition, Inc., the world’s first Cognitive Security Analytics company, is based in Austin, Texas. The company is successfully building and deploying a cognitive, data-driven analytics platform for Clouds, Devices and the Internet of Things (IoT) industrial and security markets by applying patent-pending algorithms that deliver out of-band, symptom-sensitive analytics, insights and security.

SparkCognition was named the 2015 Hottest Start Up in Austin by SXSW and the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce. The Company was the only US-based company to win Nokia’s 2015 Open Innovation Challenge. In 2015, it was named a Gartner Cool Vendor, and in 2016 SparkCognition garnered the Frost and Sullivan Technology Convergence Award. Recently, the Edison Awards recognized the company’s cyber security achievements. For more, visit http://sparkcognition.com/